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We propose inertial versions of block coordinate descent methods for solving non-convex non-smooth composite optimization problems. Our methods possess three main advantages compared to current state-of-the-art accelerated first-order…
Sparse learning is a very important tool for mining useful information and patterns from high dimensional data. Non-convex non-smooth regularized learning problems play essential roles in sparse learning, and have drawn extensive attentions…
Optimization problems with continuous data appear in, e.g., robust machine learning, functional data analysis, and variational inference. Here, the target function is given as an integral over a family of (continuously) indexed target…
The performance of optimization methods is often tied to the spectrum of the objective Hessian. Yet, conventional assumptions, such as smoothness, do often not enable us to make finely-grained convergence statements -- particularly not for…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing the sum of nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth functions over a connected multi-agent network, where the agents have partial knowledge about the global cost function and can only access the…
Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…
We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function that is evolving according to unknown and possibly stochastic dynamics, which may depend jointly on time and on the decision variable itself. Such problems abound in the machine…
In this paper we consider distributed optimization problems in which the cost function is separable, i.e., a sum of possibly non-smooth functions all sharing a common variable, and can be split into a strongly convex term and a convex one.…
Nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology in the sense of scalability. A reason for this…
Graduated optimization is a global optimization technique that is used to minimize a multimodal nonconvex function by smoothing the objective function with noise and gradually refining the solution. This paper experimentally evaluates the…
In this work, we develop analysis and algorithms for a class of (stochastic) bilevel optimization problems whose lower-level (LL) problem is strongly convex and linearly constrained. Most existing approaches for solving such problems rely…
Gradient sampling (GS) has proved to be an effective methodology for the minimization of objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The most computationally expensive component of a contemporary GS method is the need to…
Finite-sum Coupled Compositional Optimization (FCCO), characterized by its coupled compositional objective structure, emerges as an important optimization paradigm for addressing a wide range of machine learning problems. In this paper, we…
We focus on interval algorithms for computing guaranteed enclosures of the solutions of constrained global optimization problems where differential constraints occur. To solve such a problem of global optimization with nonlinear ordinary…
We present a method for non-smooth convex minimization which is based on subgradient directions and string-averaging techniques. In this approach, the set of available data is split into sequences (strings) and a given iterate is processed…
Constrained non-convex optimization is fundamentally challenging, as global solutions are generally intractable and constraint qualifications may not hold. However, in many applications, including safe policy optimization in control and…
Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…
A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…
We propose a novel stochastic smoothing accelerated gradient (SSAG) method for general constrained nonsmooth convex composite optimization, and analyze the convergence rates. The SSAG method allows various smoothing techniques, and can deal…